Miles Merwin had at least 13 children from three wives. Miles was born in Clewer, Berkshire, England in 1623, and settled in Milford in 1645, where he purchased parcels of land in Woodmont throughout the 1600s.

Besides having an engraved stone on the Memorial Bridge, Merwin Point and Merwin Avenue are both named after Miles Merwin, one of Milford’s earliest settlers. So, who was Jesse Merwin? If you live in Milford, you have heard the Merwin name before. It was this man, Jesse Merwin of Milford, who would inspire Washington Irving to write one of America’s most famous and enduring tales. It was in Kinderhook, NY, ten years earlier that the young writer met the man upon whom he would base the main character of his tale-a young man who, like his protagonist-had left his home in Connecticut to teach the descendants of Dutch settlers in a one-room schoolhouse in NY. Influenced by the romantic movement’s embrace of the natural and supernatural world, Irving’s tale imbued the Hudson Valley with a sense of mystery and magic. Ensconced near the eerie landscape of the fog-shrouded Yorkshire moors, Irving was instead inspired by the land of his youth-the rolling hills, rivers, and forests of New York’s Hudson River Valley. When Washington Irving sat down in 1819 to write his famous short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, he was living in the north of England. …He was a native of Connecticut, a State which supplies the Union with pioneers for the mind as well as for the forest, and sends forth yearly its legion of frontier woodmen and country schoolmasters…” -The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

The Consecration by Jesse Merwin